1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to the field of computers, and in particular to multiple server blades housed in a server chassis. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a method and system for configuring an input/output processor on a server blade to allow multiple Universal Serial Bus (USB) devices to be connectible to the blade server.
2. Description of the Related Art
Server blade computers offer high-density server boards (blades) in a single server blade chassis (blade center chassis). A typical server blade computer is illustrated in FIG. 1, identified as server blade chassis 102. Server blade chassis 102 includes multiple hot-swappable server blades 104a-n. There are typically fourteen server blades 104 in server blade chassis 102. The operations of server blades 104 are coordinated by logic identified as management modules 108, each of which allocates jobs and data to the different server blades 104. Typically, a first management module 108a is designated as the primary management module, and a second management module 108b is a back-up to be used if the primary management module 108a should fail.
During configuration and set-up of server blades 104, server blade designers have to know which hardware devices they want installed on a blade planar. For example, when initially set up, server blade 104n was set up with a first USB port 110a coupled to a first USB device 112a, and a second USB port 110b coupled to a second USB device 112b. The USB devices 112 may be any USB compliant device, such as a CDROM (Compact Disk-Read Only Memory) drive, a modem, a mouse, a keyboard, a hard or floppy drive (or their image), or an Ethernet. Space must be allocated on the planar (physical board on which devices making up the server blade 104 are mounted) for both the USB ports 110 as well as the USB devices 112, thus fixing the function of each server blade 104 (and its associated devices) at design time.
What is needed, therefore, is a method and system for allowing multiple USB devices to be on-the-fly configurable on a server blade without the need for additional hardware connection points or hardware devices. Preferably, the method and system would use a reconfigurable input/output (I/O) processor, on the server blade, wherein the reconfigurable I/O processor would allow a user to choose the function of the reconfigurable I/O processor based on functionality required, local and remote security levels, and/or locally available resources.